Farland’s Writing for Fun and Profit

There are some hard realities when it comes to writing, especially if you want to make a living at it. But today, I want to focus on some of the other benefits of writing that come from just writing for fun. I love writing because 1) It fulfills my primal need to communicate more deeply than saying, "Thank you, and have a nice day" does. I find deep satisfaction in writing a beautiful paragraph. 2) A writer can live anywhere in the world that he wants to--so long as he can afford the price. That means that if I want to live on a deserted island in Samoa and power my laptop with solar rays, I can do it. The Antarctic--no problem. England, Ireland, New Zealand--all high on my list of places to retire. I love not being tied to a local economy. (I've known writers who have moved to places like Samoa, Chile, and so on in order to save money. In some cases, they've cut their cost of living down to under $500 per month.) 3) I don't have a boss breathing down my neck--other than my wife. I don't have to play office politics. I don't have to get the pizzas to your door in eight minutes, guaranteed. In short, the job-related stress is minimal. 4) I get to work on my own schedule, within reason. That means that if I want to work for twenty hours today because I'm in the mood, I can do that. I've done it before. But if I feel lousy and would prefer to do research by reading the novels or watching the movies of my competitors, I can do that, too--and it's tax deductible! 5) I'm my own businessman. That means that if I make a lot of money for the company this year, I get to keep it. 6) The dress standards at work are very lax. For all that you know, I could be writing this in my underwear. Other than pole-dancing, what other job lets you work in your underwear? In short, there are a lot of reasons to like this job even if you're not making a lot of money. But the truth is that it is easier to make a living than it might sound to some. Years ago, I was teaching a class on writing, and I told the class that "Being a writer is both far easier and far harder than you will ever imagine." Brandon Sanderson was taking the class, and said that he didn't understand what I meant--until he did it. It's hard to be a writer because you have to be diligent and dedicated from the start. No one cheers you on in the beginning. Instead, you push yourself without fanfare. In fact, if you're like me, your parents will try to dissuade you, and many of your friends will tell you that you're deluding yourself into believing that you can make a career in writing. So it seems impossibly hard, often for years. Then you sell your first novel. Suddenly you have a little income (on top of the pizza job you've been hanging onto). And then you begin selling foreign rights and movie rights, and you have more money than you know what to do with (after having learned for years how to survive on nothing). And then you begin to wonder, "Why don't more people do this?" It is, after all, the easiest job in the world! So the question arises, is it really a viable career choice? How much money does the average writer make? When I was in college back in the early eighties, I used to hear about a survey that had been taken that showed that the average writer in America makes something like $5,200 per year. That was disheartening. Interestingly, I still hear that figure being thrown out at conventions. The survey, it seems, was taken back in the late 1960s and the same figures have been used in writing classes ever since. Now, in 1968 my father was working in a sawmill for $1.25 per hour. He wasn't making half as much as the "average" writer. I don't know how much other writers make, but I am willing to bet that I still make twice as much as your average sawmill worker. There are lots of sources of income for a novelist. Let me just give you a few. 1) Novel rights sales. When you sell a novel, you typically make much of your money by selling American rights. But you also resell the same novel to foreign countries. Thus, when I write a book, I may sell it in the U.S., then to England, Germany, France, Italy, China, Russia, Spain, and so on. I've sold and resold the rights to some books more than twenty times. In some countries, you may catch on very well. For example, Marion Zimmer Bradley was fairly successful as a fantasy author in the U.S., but in Germany she was the #1 bestselling author period--and she made millions of dollars on foreign rights. I've known American authors who've made 90 percent of their income selling books in countries like Japan, Romania, and England. 2) Ancillary rights sales. When you sell a novel, you may often option off the movie rights to the book. Thus, you might sell the book rights for as little as five thousand dollars in the U.S., but suddenly get a million dollar paycheck for movie rights. Books can also be turned into plays, video games, role-playing games, and so on. I knew one novelist a few years back who became so popular in Japan that he made a sizable income selling his picture--to go on t-shirts. (For some reason, I have never been able to break into David Farland action figures, though.) 3) Work-for-hire. Once you become an established author (and perhaps even before), you may be asked to do work for hire. In these cases your job might be to write novels set in someone else's universe. Now, I've personally written novels in the Star Wars and Mummy universes, and I've helped design and script videogames for StarCraft, Xena, and others. Some of those projects paid royalties, and some didn't. But the important point here is that just with these little projects, back when I did such things, I typically made more than your average pizza delivery guy or sawmill worker could make in a year--and I was working at it for less than three months per year. 4) Contests. In college I worked as a prize writer to make money on the side. There aren't many contests open to professional writers, but there are literary awards. Some of these are run through state-sponsored contests, others are voted on by juries, and some are fan-based popularity contests. Most of them either offer a cash prize, or they will help boost your sales--and thus pay dividends on the back end. 5) Work outside your primary field. As a writer, I typically write one epic fantasy novel per year. I also write at least one YA novel per year. Beyond that I may write other things. One year I wrote a 200,000-word historical novel. Another year I wrote half of a thriller. I've made as much as $15,000 in a year writing short stories on the side. But I know writers who like to write in many other fields--mystery, romance, horror, and so on. One favorite for many authors is writing nonfiction. Let's say that in your research on vampires, you become an expert on the real Count Dracula, or Transylvania, or blood diseases. Why not turn your notes into a nonfiction book? So for a novelist it is often easy to move into a secondary field--such as writing articles for magazines. Beyond writing outside your field, why not consider writing in another medium? I suspect that I could make a fine living as a screenwriter, if I wanted. My credentials as a New York Times Bestseller would go a long way toward gaining credibility--particularly in scripting movies in the fantasy and science fiction fields. Add that to my background in gaming and movie production . . . and even I have to wonder why I don't give more of a try. 6) Teaching. As a writer, you may find yourself in a position to take a full-time job teaching creative writing. I used to work part-time at Brigham Young University, teaching the science fiction and fantasy writing classes, and I turned down a full-time position simply because I knew that it would interfere with my writing schedule. But a lot of authors enjoy the security of doing this. You can of course teach even outside schools. As you know, I teach writing seminars throughout the year. 7) Work on the side in writing-related fields. I work as the coordinating judge for a large international writing contest. I've known other authors who've worked as fiction editors or reviewers, or who've worked writing back copy for other people's novels. I've done a little work as the Director of Storytelling for an animation company, a job that required me to hire and evaluate other writers' work along with creating story lines for feature films. In short, when you're a writer, you typically don't wear just one hat. You can if you want to, but I like to do a lot of different things. Keeping busy makes life so much more interesting--as long as you love what you're doing!

Farland's Surprising Language

In storytelling, I often point out that in order to engage a reader’s interest, we need to offer something strange. In other words, people become fascinated when they visit a strange new world or fantastic setting. They can also become engrossed in a character who thinks, speaks, or behaves in an unpredictable fashion. An unusual conflict can also grip your reader. Yet if you study many an author in the mainstream, you’ll find that they strive to engage the reader primarily by offering up surprising language. In other words, if you’re writing about a guy named Joe who lives down the street in Everytown, U.S.A., he’s not going to be engaging as a person, nor is the reader likely to be riveted by the bizarre new Wal-Mart down the street. If his main conflict in life is that he’s squabbling with his wife over whether she should invest their savings on getting a hair extension, that’s probably not going to blow a reader’s mind. So what’s left in your arsenal? Language—your own personal style and treatment of the tale. If you pay close attention to certain writers, you’ll find that they use language in surprising ways in order to engage an audience. Let’s take J.K. Rowling, for example. Her Harry Potter novels have become a global sensation. Ostensibly, her first novel was a middle-grade book. But have you studied her language? It isn’t written at a third-grade level. Her sentences are a bit too long and convoluted. Her use of archaic words, and frequent use of multisyllabic words add further difficulty to the reading, as does her made-up words like “Muggles.” In fact, years ago I ran her work through various programs to see what level she was really writing at, and I found that she scored at a ninth-grade level. So her work would actually be quite challenging for a younger child. In fact, when you’re writing for an adult audience, the rule of thumb is that you should be writing at a sixth-grade level, not a ninth-grade level. So Rowling writes in a surprisingly adult style for someone who is supposedly aiming her novels at children that have just graduated from reading picture books. In fact, I believe that her work succeeds so well precisely because she does not “write down” to a child’s level. The strangeness and difficulty that her language evokes is actually rather enticing to both children and casual readers. Little kids will pick up her novels and proudly show their parents and teachers, “Look what I’m reading.” I know that they do it because when I appear at book signings I’ve had literally hundreds of parents tell me, “Oh, my son is a very advanced reader. He’s only nine, but he’s read all of the Harry Potter books!” For a child to read Rowling is a badge of honor. There are dozens of other ways to surprise your readers, of course. One method is to use neologisms, modern slang, or regional dialects in your stories. If you have a character on the streets of New York who speaks with a thick Haitian accent, for example, it can give him that aura of uniqueness that you might be searching for. Just make sure that you’re fluent in the dialect that you’re trying to reproduce. One of my mentors, the poet Leslie Norris, used to say, “Try to avoid using modifiers on nouns or verbs unless they’re surprising in some way.” In other words, if you had two people meet at the office in the morning, and a secretary smiles at her boss, you would probably not put the words “joyful smile” together. Smiles are usually joyful or mirthful. But what if you say, “A brief, desolate smile flashed like summer lightning across Serena’s lips,” you’ll attract our attention. Smiles aren’t often desolate. In fact, we create a sense of depth to the story that otherwise wouldn’t be there. By doing this, we infuse the tale with layer upon layer of underlying meaning. We create something of a mystery. Why is her smile so desolate? Another popular method for surprising the reader is through the use of inventive similes or metaphors. You have to take care though. The metaphors need to be both surprising and accurate. “The air on the tarmac at Las Vegas was hotter than a bee sting, drier than yesterday’s biscuit.” That works for me. But it’s easy to go over the top and come off sounding silly. I read a story once for a contest in which a man had a headache so bad that “It felt like a herd of giraffes were stomping on his temple.” Now, I had to stop and try to clear my mind of the image of an entire herd of giraffes stomping on someone’s head. I just couldn’t do it, and so of course rejected the tale posthaste. There are of course other ways to surprise readers with language. Combining high language and low language is one way to do it. Yogi Berra was a master at saying something intelligent one second and sounding like an idiot the next. “This is like déjà vu all over again!” “You’d better just cut that pizza into four pieces, cause I can’t eat six.” “Baseball is 90% physical, and the other half is mental!” Perhaps the greatest author to study in this regard is Shakespeare. His contemporaries complained that between his use of neologisms, archaisms, twisted word orders, and invented language he was practically indecipherable to the common man of his day. All of that is true. Yet after 400 years he remains one of the most oft-quoted men alive. So as an author, learn how to keep your reader entertained with surprising language. It will become one of your most valuable writing tools. Less is More At times you will want your prose to be as spare as possible. For example, when you’re writing a fight scene, it’s no time to slow down your pacing with long descriptions, or to ramble on about the vicissitudes of life. Can you imagine how a badly written scene might read? “Trayvor’s sword flicked forward with a burst, like the tongue of an asp as it tastes the air. Only this time it tasted the orc’s blood. “Oh. how Trayvor wearied of this. Orcs again, attacking in his favorite inn. He’d only come for a nice stout ale, dark and cold from the Innkeeper Gormath’s cellars! It had been three days since he’d had a fine brew, and now this!” “The orc fell away, its red eyes bulging in its squinty green face. There was terror in its eyes. Even a hog knows when it’s doing to die, and orcs are far cleverer than hogs. This one had a black iron nose ring in its left nostril, and it gaped its mouth wide as it staggered backward, clutching a stool for support, its steaming breath hissing out in a cry, its yellow fangs slicing the air. The creature was surprisingly well dressed for an orc, all in black leather, like a movie producer. “'Grissshta!' it called. Whether it was the name of the orc’s lover or a child, Trayvor did not know, but he suddenly grieved for his mortal enemy. “Trayvor glanced up into the corner of the room, there above the firepit where a spinnerdog tread a weary circle, still roasting a ham above the hot coals even with the battle going on. There where the ceiling met the walls a yellow garden spider harvested a bluebottle fly. "We are all caught in death’s web, Trayvor mused. Today I am the spider, but my time is coming soon. Someday, I shall be the fly.” Oy, I think you see what I mean. I’ve read scenes like that a hundred times as new authors struggle to bring a fight scene to life. You don’t need all of that. It just gets in the way. Similarly, I’ve seen those moments where a young woman suddenly gushes with newly discovered love, and the author will seek ways to convince us that her love is purer, larger, and nobler than any love that has ever blossomed within a woman’s breast. That’s nice, but it doesn’t work. Your goal is not to describe how your character feels, but to create an experience that makes the reader feel the desired emotion. Your goal isn’t to describe how your heroine feels, it’s to make the reader fall in love. Very often, it is not the overwrought description of an incident that arouses the emotion, but a nice spare depiction that simply makes the reader feel as he or she should feel. Sometimes, less is more.